Knowing Yourself Makes All The Difference

You can’t be yourself if you don’t know who you are. So how do you know who you are? Everyone is a gooey batter of both nature and nurture, and every time shit hits the fan in our lives, we have an opportunity to get to know ourselves a bit better. It’s an⁣ exhausting experience, but it’s enriching.⁣ We learn about ourselves through all of our interactions with the world, both good and bad. This is the reason your fourth-grade teacher taught you about rocks—not because it’s important to know the difference between sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks, but because a little dabble on a subject may awaken something in you to help you become the next Charles Darwin or Ross Geller. So with everything you do, think about how it shapes who you are, and think about how who you are shapes your experience of everything you do.⁣
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The more you know yourself, the more you can live a life that feels right for you. The life you want to live will rarely be one-size-fits-all.⁣
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Society, culture, and all the people you care about will try to make decisions for you, accidentally reinforcing their own desires for your conformity. But with conforming comes the kind of stress that can’t be meditated away ten minutes a day using an app on your phone.⁣
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The journey to know yourself better isn’t paved and doesn’t come with a map. That’s why you often feel like you’re lost or broken. Every moment when you’ve discovered something new about yourself likely happened the hard way, but it was worth it.

This comes from my new book THINGS NO ONE ELSE CAN TEACH US [LINK IN BIO]. It's full of poems, stories, and ideas to help you better find beauty in the bullshit that is life. Tag a friend who needs to see this.